


Move a Little Strange

by scioscribe



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Accidental Soulbond, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Caning, Canon-Typical Violence, Cock Slut, Cock Warming, Dom/sub, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Period-Typical Racism, Rimming, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 15:00:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18523909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Trying to beat a blizzard, Warren hitches a ride to Minnie's Haberdashery with John Ruth--and his mouthy, chained-up prisoner, Chris Mannix.  It's hard to believe they'll live through a two-day blizzard.It's even harder to believe they'll live through it over and over again.





	Move a Little Strange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PositivelyVexed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/gifts).



“You can have the ride,” John Ruth said, “but I don’t know as you’ll much like the company.”

“We got along fine over that steak,” Warren said.  If there was a mark of professional courtesy John Ruth wanted him to hit, well, he’d hit it, and it was almost true.

But Ruth was shaking his head.  “I don’t mean on account of me.  I got a prisoner I’m transporting.”

“Always do, don’t you?”  The wind rushed at him again, the cold feeling especially vicious where he’d tugged his scarf down to have this dumbass conversation.  “Any way we can finish up this discussion with me inside?”

John allowed as how they could, so Warren stepped up, brushing snow off his coat, tapping it off his boots so he didn’t track it in.  He sat down on the other bench and got a good look at the two men opposite him.  John Ruth had changed those mustaches of his since that Chattanooga dinner, but Warren didn’t know that he’d congratulate the barber the results.  Otherwise, same old Hangman.  Shackled to his wrist was some big-teethed cracker who looked to be having the time of his fucking life.

Warren nodded at him.  “Who’s he?”

“Chris Mannix.”

The name rang a distant bell.

“Mannix, to you, this is—”

“Oh, now, you don’t got to introduce me to Major Marquis Warren.  _Everybody_ in my neck of the woods is familiar with good old Major Marquis.”

Honeyed Carolina accent, those stuck-out teeth of his.  Mannix.  Warren ignored him and talked to John Ruth: “Mannix as in Mannix’s Marauders?”

“That’s them.  This is the youngest one.  And once I get him to Red Rock, he ain’t gonna live to get much older.”  He guffawed, slapping his knee.  “Are you, Mannix?”

“You never can tell,” Mannix said.

“Oh, I can tell.”  John Ruth gestured to him with his uncuffed hand.  “He’s what I meant when I said could be you’d object to the company.  But seeing as I’m taking him off to have his neck broke, I guess you might not mind as much.”

No, Warren didn’t mind.  Working the way he did, the opportunity to see a Confederate hillbilly chained up didn’t come around more than once in a blue moon, and since he’d be stuck with Ruth and Mannix till the blizzard wore itself out, he made up his mind to enjoy it.  They got back to churning up snow and Chris Mannix got back to looking at him like he was a strung-up Christmas tree with every present a boy could want.

“What did he mean?” John Ruth said.  “When he said everybody back home had heard of you.”

“What I meant was—”

There was a hard crack as John drove his elbow into Mannix’s mouth, busted his lip for him.  Warren watched him spit out a mouthful of blood on the coach floor and felt warmer already.  A bit of it came just shy of his boot so he stretched his legs out a little, surreptitious-like, and trod in it.  He liked that just fine.

John Ruth was passing on sensible counsel: “You want to keep mouthing off, Chris Mannix, you better start counting your teeth and figuring out how many you want to be buried with.  Because I got no problem knocking ’em out one by one.  And I’m sure the major here wouldn’t mind watching me do it, would you, Warren?”

“Hell, I’d buy tickets.”

“You got that, Mannix?  And _that_ you got it’s all I want to hear you say.”

Mannix wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a wide trail of blood.  He turned his hand over, frowning a little at the mark, and then licked it off himself.

“I got it,” he said, though with what he’d been doing, it could have been that he was informing them all he’d cleaned up the bloodstain.

But John Ruth seemed content with the answer and settled back in.  “So like I was saying.”

“You responsible for that black eye of his?”

“You know I am.  You like it?”

“Like it even better if it was part of a matching set.”

“I’m sure we’ll get around to that by the time we reach Minnie’s.  Let alone what parts he’ll be missing by the time we get to Red Rock.  But I was asking you a question.”

Warren spun him some prettied-up tale about Confederates weeping into their hankies whenever news came back that their sons and brothers and husbands had died on account of him in particular.  It wasn’t the finest work he’d ever done but it did rate up there with the most enjoyable, the way Mannix squirmed all through it like his seat was a hot griddle, how red-faced he got with wanting to call Warren to account for Wellenbeck’s dead Rebs.  Tormenting him was the most pleasure Warren had wrung out of a day in a while now.

John Ruth got a little incidental to them, he had to admit.  He almost liked the man, but he’d take hate over liking every time.

So they beat on to Minnie’s and Warren bullshitted and watched Mannix suck on that sore lip of his like he was muzzling himself with it.  Both of them knowing that he’d get hit for getting out of line.  And he supposed he’d go so far as to say it wasn’t the beating that bothered Mannix—he’d taken it just about in stride—but Warren seeing it and getting such almighty pleasure form it.  It was that pleasure Mannix didn’t want to cave and give him.

All of which lasted exactly as long as it took them to get to the Lincoln letter, because no sooner had Mannix absorbed what was getting handed over as he was laughing his fool head off, turning himself beet-red with absolute fucking delight.  It cost him a tooth, but by the look on his face, he didn’t regret losing it any.  He grinned at Warren like they were the only two people in on the joke.  It was the kind of thing that would give even a good man some unkind inclinations.

* * *

They drank up Minnie’s coffee.  Even Mannix got a cup.

“You planning on leaving him chained to you this whole time?” Warren said casually.

Mannix looked at him before John Ruth did, and looked at him differently now.  Not without a trace of nervousness, which was the first sign Warren had seen that he had any brains in his head at all.  He wondered what Mannix was seeing.  Two guns, a knife, and a hell of a lot of meanness, probably.  The real life fifty thousand dollar head of Major Marquis Warren—he liked to take the number at its most complimentary—and all the rest of him. 

Ruth considered the question.  “I can’t say as I’ve decided yet.  When I scooped him up, I wasn’t counting on three days in the asshole’s company in the middle of a raging blizzard.”

“That right there’s why I don’t scoop,” Warren said.  “Take note of that, hillbilly.  If it’d been me found you, shit would have worked out a mite differently.”

Mannix put to rest that troublesome notion that he had anything like wits: “We’re gonna compare fictions, black major, and get into _might_ -have-beens, I got a few ideas on how shit would have gone if it’d been _me_ who found _you_.”

Ruth neatly smacked Mannix’s face down against the table, narrowly missing cracking that thick skull on the rim of the cup.  And while it was still gratifying to see Mannix getting manhandled and bruised up, for the first time he felt a flicker of irritation about it.  The trouble was that it wasn’t like John Ruth was rough with Mannix just to warm the cockles of Warren’s heart; he did it for himself, because he didn’t like having a mouthy fucking prisoner.  Well, Warren was trying to have a conversation, more or less, with that same prisoner, and they were going to get bogged down quick if this went on as it was.

He could leave the matter be for right now.  What he wanted out of Mannix, if he wanted anything at all, wouldn’t involve much talking.

Minnie did intervene, though.  “I know you got a penchant for smacking them around,” she said, “and I ain’t saying he don’t deserve it, but it’d be easier on me not having to scrub blood up off everything.  _And_ not having to jump every time from the thumps it makes.”

“Trust me,” John Ruth said, “you don’t want this particular jackass running his mouth at you.”

“I don’t want any kind of jackass running his mouth at me.  I’m asking you to just keep to when it’s necessary.”

John Ruth looked like he was thinking about taking a stand on the issue, but had to remember that right then Minnie’s Haberdashery was the only thing keeping his ass from freezing to death.  He mumbled some kind of assent and told Mannix not to push his fucking luck.

Warren wouldn’t push his, either.  He left the two of them alone and went over to Minnie.  “Need a hand?”

“You turning domestic on me, Major Marquis?”

“Just buttering you up, considering we’re stuck here.”

“Consider me buttered, then.  If you go on and stir that stew while I fix us up another pot of coffee.”

“I think I’m capable of that.”

He went and stirred.  He did feel unaccountably at home in the place, one of the few he knew well and was comfortable in, and helping out even in this half-assed kind of way did bring back some memories.  Most of which he could have done without.  It didn’t do any good to chase down, even in your own head, what couldn’t be gotten back.

He said, “Sorry to come crowd up your place.”

“Every day the storm lasts is more money in my pocket from all of you,” Minnie said, waving off the apology.  “Though you can tell John Ruth he has to pay for that prisoner’s keep, too.”

John Ruth had a passel of faults, but Warren didn’t think he’d be unreasonable there.  “He does seem to be a handful—the prisoner, I mean.  He gives you any trouble, you let me know.”

“Honey, I don’t care how much trouble he is so long as he don’t make my skin crawl like the fella we just got rid of this afternoon.  You believe who was sitting by my fire playing chess with Dave?  Sandy Smithers, that’s who.  I didn’t even know that old relic was still breathing.”

Warren took that in.  Missed opportunity there, he thought dimly, when he could have told that bastard one hell of a story.  It fixed his determination to get hold of Mannix somehow, now that his blood was up.  If he couldn’t have the right father, well, he’d settle for the wrong son.

He made some more light conversation with Minnie and then they got the stew dished up and he went back to the table, thinking all of it over.

So, all in all, they had him and John Ruth and Mannix and OB.  They had Minnie and Sweet Dave and Gemma and Charly.  Privacy was going to be a hard commodity to come by, but he could hurt Mannix out in the open if he had to, even if he'd prefer it otherwise.  Wasn’t nobody, even good old John, who’d go to the trouble of hanging him for anything done to Chris Mannix.  Not so long as Ruth got to keep the bounty on him and whatever weird fucking pride was tied up to bringing him in alive.

Mannix peered at him interestedly, spooning stew into his mouth.  John Ruth had uncuffed him so he could eat and the effect of it, so far as Warren was concerned, was mixed.  Pictorial appeal of a Southern white boy in chains was never something to be underestimated.  On the other hand, Mannix had a kind of good, dangerous quality to him now, a killer’s smile to go with those overeager puppy eyes.  And it was more fun to start with them like that, so sure of themselves and their pure white skin, so convinced in their hearts that they were unbeatable, unkillable.

A mistake he could correct at his leisure, so long as the storm kept up.

“What did he do, anyway?” Warren said to John Ruth.

“Question being more along the lines of what _ain’t_ he done, would be my guess, but if you’re asking what’s on his papers: murder.”

“What kind?”

“The useless fucking waste of time kind,” Mannix muttered.

John Ruth got a chuckle out of that one and let the talking slide.  “The kind that for damn sure gets you hung, you get brought back to trial in Red Rock.  Killed their sheriff while he was springing some friend of his out of jail.  And how did that go for you, Mannix?”

“Not so well,” Mannix said.  Sing-song, but with a kind of hate in his eyes Warren mostly only knew from mirrors.

“Fella he busted out high-tailed it just fine when I found ’em.  Bounty on Mannix being higher, four thousand dollars to his friend’s one, I decided to stay with the bird in the hand instead of giving chase.”  John Ruth crumbled up some cornbread into his stew and slurped at it.  “Not much of a story.”

“Who’s the friend?”

“Lance Lawson,” Mannix said.  “You want to go on and hunt him down for me, major, give him a good talking-to about fucking _loyalty_?”

“Hell, for just about turning you over to be hanged, I might shake his hand and let that thousand dollars walk away upright and fancy-free.”

“Same shit makes you want me dead would make you want _him_ dead.  We were partners.”

“All the same,” Warren said, trying out the stew.  Good as ever.  He looked to John Ruth and said, “There’s a decent-sized post in the cellar you could fix him up to, you get a hankering for sleep or just sick of having him hanging off you.”

He had pushed it too hard.  Ruth put his spoon down, his eyes gone narrow.  “You seem awfully interested in what I’m doing with my bounty, Warren.”

“You gonna kill him for it?” Mannix said hopefully.  Question earned him a bloody nose, which he seemed to consider a fair enough tradeoff.

“I didn’t figure you for a thief so damn unambitious you’d settle for trash like this not even worth five grand,” John Ruth said.  “But if you are, we’d better settle that up quick.”

“I got no designs on stealing him.”  He thought he might as well be a little truthful.  He doubted it would cost him anything.  He kept his voice low, though, to try to spare Minnie and them from the turn of his mind: “I’ve been thinking more along the lines that there’s no… let’s say _moral imperative_ to you bringing him into Red Rock unscathed.  That seems plain enough.  Now, you’re looking at that as a kind of practical measure, keeping him quiet and so on.  I get that too.  But me, I could interest myself in some impractical shit, with all respect to Minnie and her clean tables and floors.  Guess I got a mean streak.”

John Ruth snorted.  “Guess you do.  Then again, guess he deserves it.”

“That’s no way to think about things,” Chris Mannix said.  Sweat on his upper lip.  “You ought to have a sense of responsibility.”

“And you ought to shut the fuck up before I got to make you.”  Ruth appeared to be giving the whole question more moral weight than Warren thought it deserved.  Then again, him being at all willing to turn a white man over to a black one made Warren feel well-disposed towards him.

So he added, generously, “I’d leave him breathing.  Leave him walking upright, even, so it ain’t like you’d have to go lugging him around.”

“What are you thinking of doing to him?”

Like John Ruth, staunch and righteous, could handle all the notions that were in Warren's head.  “What, specifically?  I ain’t decided yet.  I might be guided by the whims of the moment.”

“He’s lying to you about the Lincoln letter,” Mannix said suddenly.  “You could wipe your ass with it for all it matters, the motherfucker wrote the thing himself.”

“Horseshit,” John Ruth said, scoffing.  “I know real when I see it.”

“No, the major was drummed—”

Ruth hit him across the mouth again, this time not stopping at a single blow.  Minnie looked up and Warren shook his head at her—there were some things that couldn’t be intervened with, where it didn’t pay to trouble yourself, and this was one of them.

Funny that Chris Mannix of all people had found him out, though.

Ruth concluded his lesson on interruptions by pointing a gun at Mannix’s temple and telling him that one more uninvited word from him would lead to his brains painting the wall.  Then he handed him a handkerchief to mop the blood up with and threw some gruff apology Minnie’s way.

There was a little flicker of doubt in those eyes now, once they turned back his way, but Warren could handle that.  John Ruth wanted to believe in pen pals and ole Mary Todd and hand in hand progress; wanting to believe in those things made a man weak in his mind.  He could be persuaded back to friendliness.

John Ruth said, “I don’t know what kind of bullshit he was working his way up to there, but I know it was bullshit.  Wasn’t it?”

If he had to ask, it seemed like he didn’t know as much as he’d like to think, but Warren said, “’Course it was,” keeping his voice nice and easy.  “He’s just trying to save his ass, make you think you owe him something.  Like he’s throwing himself selflessly between you and some devious fucking nigger.  That’d be about how he’d put it, I figure.”

“And I figure you’d be right.”

He might owe Chris Mannix a thank you, cementing the bond between them like he had, pissing off John Ruth something furious.  Nothing he liked more than a white boy who worked in his own worst interests: it was just so goddamn funny.

“I guess you’re right about chaining him up in the cellar, too,” John Ruth said steadily.  “No sense leaving him up here with decent people.”

Decent people.  Warren didn’t let himself smile at that.

“No sense at all,” Warren agreed.

* * *

He let Mannix wait for it, didn’t go downstairs until half-past midnight.  He brought a lantern with him so they could see each other.

Trussed up to that post, Chris Mannix looked—not _good_ , _good_ wasn’t a word Warren would sully with Mannix’s company, but he looked _right_.  All bruised up, blood drying on his face.  Shoulders crooked back from where John Ruth had cuffed his hands behind him.  Warren took out his knife and toyed with it, making sure the light glinted off the blade.

“Oh, a knife _and_ a fire,” Mannix said, all honeyed draw.  “Am I supposed to guess which one you’ll choose?”

Warren found he liked him mouthy.  Most white men in his place would have been pissing themselves by now.  “You’ve got some uncivilized expectations of me, Chris Mannix.”

“Well, if the shoe fits.  Unlike him upstairs, I got some idea of the death toll comes with you.”  He said the words like he was picking every last bit of meat off their bones; Warren had an idea that the worst thing John Ruth had done to him was make him shut up.  Mannix was the kind of talk the ears off his own executioner.

If he’d been scared or angry or so stupid as to think they could get along, Warren would have gotten started hurting him right away, but there was something not unlikable about the way the two of them passed their hate back and forth like a ball.

“You don’t know half that death toll, Mannix.”

“You keep count?’

Warren chuckled.  “You know I do.”

“It include those boys at Wellenbeck?”

“Rebs and Yankees both.”

Mannix whistled, real low.  “You’re a mean bastard, major.”  He said it sort of admiringly.  “Fine, counting up the redskins and the Wellenbeck fire and your bounties—”

“And the war in general,” Warren said.

“And the war in general,” Mannix added obediently.  He frowned.  “You ever kill another nigger?”

“Wouldn’t balk at it, but never saw the need to, no.  You ever kill anybody but?”

Mannix flexed his shoulders in what was probably meant to be a shrug.  “That sheriff.”

“Yeah.  No surprise he’s what you’ll hang for.”

“Life sure is tough for you,” Mannix said, “seeing me choke for your very favorite crime, instead of any of the others.  But I was gonna ask you where your tally wound up.”

Warren smiled.  “Come on now, Chris,” he said, just to needle him.  “We hardly know each other.”

Mannix didn’t seem able to figure out the joke was on him.  “Maybe so, but I don’t have time enough left to get to know anybody.”  He frowned.  “You ever see a man hang?”

“Once or twice.  Don’t worry, white boy, John Ruth will watch you swing.  You won’t get lonesome.”

“It’s an ugly way to go,” Mannix said softly, “if you got to strangle, if there ain’t enough of a drop.”

Warren thought about how Mannix probably knew that, the sort of hangings he’d probably watched, and whatever weird liking he’d been feeling slipped away like smoke.  He came closer, knife still out.  Mannix’s eyes were starting to stay on it.  Warren slid the flat of it against his cheek, letting him feel that cold steel.  Cutting him only incidentally.  Mannix sucked in a breath at it, blood running down his jaw—and then turned his head a little and rested his cheek lightly against the blade, leaning up against it like a cat leaning into somebody’s hand.  His eyes were dark and far from right.

It sparked some fuse in Warren.  His anger aside, they’d somehow fallen back into being on the same page with each other.  When they shouldn’t have even been in the same fucking book.

Warren moved the knife further down, pointing it at Mannix’s chest, and then cut the first button off his collar, watched his throat flutter at it.  He cut off another one.

“Stand up.”  He wanted to confirm something for himself.

Mannix’s face was blood-dark even underneath all the bruises, flushed up like a hot stove, but he struggled to get himself up even with his hands stuck like they were.  Warren watched him work his feet under himself, not bothering to help.  He saw what he’d guessed he would.

“Hell,” he said, “I’m flattered.  John Ruth spent all day breaking you in and you didn’t so much as blow him a kiss.  Here I scratch you a little and you get more wood than a fucking forest.”

Mannix stared at the cellar wall.

“Your daddy know you were like this?” Warren said.  He was getting fonder of this situation all the time.

That roused something.  “I ain’t like anything.”

“Hard-on you’re sporting begs to differ.”  The way he’d gotten himself vertical despite the pain it’d caused him did too, and in an even more interesting kind of way.  Warren found his plans for the night had shifted.

“That don’t mean nothing,” Mannix said.

“Couple days time will see you in your grave, Mannix.  You want to get there with or without getting jerked off one last time?  Because I can tell you right now, John Ruth’s not gonna be taking you to no last stop whorehouse.  Your pickings are pretty damn slim.”

Mannix scoffed.  “Like you’re gonna uncuff me and let me take care of myself.  Major, I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“I ain’t offering to uncuff you.  I’m offering you a hand.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart,” Mannix said.

“Nah, I don’t have any of that.  I was thinking more along the lines of a trade.  Not that the deal would be worked out to your advantage, and not that you’d be used to that, you being from the kind of people you are.  But a deal all the same.”  He was watching Mannix’s face as closely as he’d ever watched anything in his life, watched the flickering lamplight dance across those pretty bruises of his.  There was a boy who ought to be marked up permanently, fucked up every day of the rest of his short, short life.  Thinking about him at the end of the rope made heat stir all through him.  He looked at those downcast eyes.  Little bit of dried blood in Mannix’s eyelashes.

Finally, Mannix said, “What kind of deal?”

It was him bothering to put a kind of faked-up innocence in his voice that tipped Warren off that Mannix was even more off in the head than he seemed.  So he changed his strategy last minute.

“Let’s say it’s this.  I can jerk you off— _or_ you can get down on your knees and run that tongue of yours all over my cock, take me in your mouth, suck me off.”

Mannix looked for a beat, wide-eyed, and then he looked at everything else, like the correct answer to the question was going to present itself, like his daddy’s ghost was going to lurch out at him.  He touched his tongue to his lips.  By then enough time had gone by that they both knew what he wanted, what he would take if he could only have the one.  An ordinary man—even one with unusual habits—would have answered right away, would have had no trouble choosing at all.

Warren hoped the light caught his smile just right.  He wanted Mannix to linger on it.

By the look of him, he did.  But the more he flushed, the harder he seemed to get.

“All right,” Mannix said.  Maybe he’d just remembered he was due for death soon anyhow, figured he didn’t have much to lose by letting shame take him a couple days early.  “I’ll blow you, major.”

It would have been fun to walk away from him then, go back up to bed and the peaceable company of good people.  Leave Mannix alone in the dark with blue balls and the funk of his own want and shame.  It appealed to him.

But, shit, he was only human, and a blowjob appealed to him too.  So he undid his buttons one by one and let Mannix watch him do it.

He walked forward and took Mannix by the hair, yanking it hard.  “You get any smart ideas, Chris Mannix, and I’ll put a bullet in your head.”  He showed him the gun in his hand to prove it.

“Oh, I’m sure of that.  But it'd be one hell of a way to go.”  He smirked and Warren dug his thumb into one of the sore spots on his lower lip and listened to him yowl at it.

“Kneel down there for me, Chris.”

Mannix swallowed and then did as he was told, lowering himself down carefully, a nice little wince on his face at the discomfort of moving around with his shoulders still back like that.  He opened his mouth.  Waited.

And Warren had had his fair share of lays over the years, but never one quite like this.  Never a Southern cracker down on his knees, mouth open, wanting him and hating it.  The sight of it seemed to tug something inside him into place, like setting a broken bone.  Sharp and right.

He stood close to Mannix, but not close enough for Mannix to take him in his mouth without straining forwards a little.  Not that Mannix seemed like he was about to complain.

He licked Warren first, like he wanted to savor him.  And he wasn’t shy about it, for all it shamed him; evidently Chris Mannix was in the in for a penny kind.  He tongued Warren’s slit and made some low, fervent moan at whatever taste he found there.  Sucked on the head of his cock a while.  He was a lot of things, Mannix, but he was no amateur; he sucked cock like a man who’d done a lot of it.  But still needy, Warren thought, pushing forward into that hot, tight throat of his, cutting through all this preliminary shit—still needy, like however much he’d taken in his mouth couldn’t ever be enough.

Mannix made a startled sound at Warren thrusting the rest of the way into his mouth, but he jerked his head and took it, not gagging around him too much, not moving away.

Mannix went on sucking him until Warren started suspecting he was enjoying himself too much.  Couldn’t have that.  He grabbed a handful of Mannix’s hair again and steered him roughly, fucking his mouth now.

No more of letting him show off what a prize-winning cocksucker he was, no, Mannix could just take what he was given.  Warren dragged him around by his hair like it was puppet strings, didn’t let the boy have a single damn say in any of it.  He came in that busted-up mouth that had been so proud a couple hours before, Chris Mannix with his Southern drawl and his nigger-hating talk and his chattiness even in chains.  Warren wanted him to remember this.  To remember how, no matter who he thought he was in daylight, he’d swallowed Warren’s spend down without hesitation.  And that felt right, too.

He balled up one hand into a fist and pressed his knuckles against some of the bruises on Mannix’s cheekbone and Mannix whimpered around Warren’s softened cock like that was the best thing he’d ever felt.

When he separated them, Mannix looked just about forlorn, so Warren patted him on the cheek.  Mannix turned his head into the touch before he could stop himself, his lips wet against Warren’s palm.

Warren moved away from him.  It was more than he’d set out to get; it made him feel like he’d touched a stove by mistake.  He recalibrated himself.  “You wasted your potential, Mannix.  You could have made yourself a nice little living somewhere, doing that.”

And hell if Mannix didn’t kneel up straighter, like he’d gotten an iron rod tied to his back, even as he turned scarlet.  “I suppose I missed my calling, then.”

He was still sporting one hell of a hard-on, not that Warren was minded to do anything about it.  Mannix had had his choice and he’d made it.

The funny thing was he wouldn’t have liked Mannix any better if Mannix had just been some specialty whore with a willing mouth; he maybe even would have liked him less.  Less than what was the question.

“You could undo my hands,” Mannix said, apparently thinking somebody had asked him to tell the funniest joke he could think of.  “Like I said before.”

“I could go on and shoot myself in the head, too, but I’m not about to.”

Mannix exhaled loudly through his nose but seemed to decide to take a philosophical position: “Bet you never saw your day ending up here, major.”

He hadn’t even seen his hour ending up here.  He’d thought to come down to the cellar and torment Mannix a little for the fun of it, wring some tears out of him, hammer home which of the two of them had a future, had the upper hand.  And maybe he had done most of that, but not how he’d planned to.

He said, “Where’d you get all that practice, white boy?”

“I name names, you gonna recognize any, black major?”

“Wasn’t a real in-earnest kind of question.  More a provocation, implying as it did that you’ve sucked a lot of cock in your life.”

“Well, we established that already,” Mannix said.  He seemed honestly confused.  To be fair, all his blood _had_ run down to his prick, and that didn’t leave much for his head to do its dubious thinking on.

Warren wondered what he’d be like after he came, after he could think about more than his privates.  The shame might come back then, and toying with it would be even funnier now that they already had that blowjob between them, an irretractable piece of evidence.  So he levered Mannix up by his arms, Mannix’s feet scrabbling around in the dirt until he got them planted.  Mannix almost level with him now, looking at him with big hopeful eyes.

He didn’t intend to gratify that hope.  Not as such.

Instead, he ran his hands up Mannix’s chest, felt Mannix quake underneath him.  He fooled around with those two missing buttons, the pad of his finger against Mannix’s pulse.

Close as they were, he could speak right into Mannix’s ear, so he did.

“Your cock’s wasted on you, white boy.  You’re better off with just your mouth.  Maybe if you suck John Ruth off the same as you did me, he’ll let you go—or if you go on your knees for every man in that jury and the judge too.  That’s where your worth’s at.  And fucked up as you are, you like knowing it, don’t you?”

Mannix butted up against him, squirming, a tight sound in his throat.  “Yes, sir.”

Warren stroked his lean hips, his legs.  Reached around him and got hold of his ass, which was a promising thing.

“Anyone ever fuck you?  I’m guessing so.  But not like I’d fuck you, Chris Mannix.”

“No, sir.”

And wasn’t that heartwarming.  Good to know Mannix believed him about the state of things.

He stroked his ass more through the rough wool of his trousers and listened to the sound of Mannix’s cuffs clanking around against the post as Mannix leaned and leaned, trying to give Warren as much access to his backside as he could.  It seemed a shame to deny him what he seemed to want so badly, so Warren shoved his trousers down around his ankles and slid his warm hands over Mannix’s cold ass.

“You like shivering in this cellar?” he said up against Mannix’s jaw.  “Boy, I’m going to pile quilts on upstairs thinking about you shaking down here.”

“You fucking--.”

He brought his hand down hard on one pale ass cheek—from above, hell, it would just sound like a slap, which it was.  Nobody would come running to look at a slap.  And since he enjoyed it, he did it a few more times.

“That warming you up any?  Though being cold ain’t really your problem, is it?  More the opposite.  Well, I got something for that too.”  He rubbed at Mannix’s asshole, not getting into it, not giving him what he wanted, just fucking around.  “Then again, the cold’s all the more reason to leave you stirred the fuck up.  This could keep you cozy all night, white boy.  Anytime you think you’re about to wind down and go to sleep, I could come back here and stretch you open till you were fucking begging for it.  That would do it for you.”  He pushed his thumb in.  Whispered, “Maybe I’d even let you taste my cock again.”

Mannix jerked forward, coming just from that.  Warren pulled his hand away, letting Mannix shake and cuss on his own.

He considered leaving Mannix’s half-undressed, but John Ruth might not be so forgiving of that kind of trouble happening with his prisoner.  So Warren got him situated again while Mannix breathed hard and refused to look at him, and it wasn’t until Warren was all set to go upstairs that Mannix said, “You should hit me again.”

He didn’t object to the suggestion, but on principle didn’t want to make a habit out of giving Mannix what he wanted.  “And why’s that?”

“Because you didn’t leave me bruised up enough,” Mannix said, meeting his eyes squarely, “and otherwise folks are going to wonder just what we got up to down here.  Now, that’s nothing to me because they can’t hang me twice and if you wound up on the gallows beside me that’d be just fine, but suspicious people, major, might have a problem with you coming down here again tomorrow night.”

“That’s a good chain of reasoning, Chris.  But I don’t have any special need to see you again.”

“Come on, now, major.  How often do you get your jollies out of a chained up country boy who knows what he’s doing?  Now that must be a rare privilege even for you.”  Mannix licked his lips, hesitating, and then said, half-hangdog and half-arrogant, “Good as any whore, you said.  And you don’t even got to pay.”

Like Warren had been seriously considering offering him money.  Like he’d even been thinking of tossing him down a blanket.  He regarded Mannix, feeling unfriendly towards him.

“And here I thought you said you weren’t that way,” he said.

“Seeing as you’re going around claiming you got a letter from the _president_ , I don’t think you should be casting too many stones about a man talking bullshit.  I’m just trying to seize an opportunity here.”

Being a dead man walking had freed him up a bit in his mind, evidently.  He’d seen other Southern white men get more agreeable when they knew they were done for, but he’d never had one go this far.  It was a rare thing, like Mannix had said.  And with being thwarted in the matter of Sandy Smithers and with having to spend a few days playing nice with John Ruth—he could use the chance to let off a little steam.

So he went back and raised his fist.

Mannix closed his eyes.

“Just my chin or something,” he said, so Warren socked him hard in the jaw, left him bitching about it.

He got back upstairs and slept soundly.  He had one of his good war dreams, hot with blood and fire, Chris Mannix strung through all that like thread through a needle.  Warren fucked him on some burned-out plantation, left him dirty with ashes on his hands and knees.  _There you are,_ Warren said in the dream, like he’d been looking all over for him.

* * *

“Not showing any sign of letting up?” Warren said.

Minnie dished him up some eggs and some toast made off the heel of the bread—on account, she said, of him oversleeping and all the good pieces already being eaten up.  “Since you can’t see further than your own nose out there, I’d say not.  You look like you’re feeling fine.  That boy’s still alive down there, ain’t he?”

“He is,” John Ruth called across the room, though nobody had asked him.  “I took that whining son-of-a-bitch down some bread and bacon grease and even soap and water, so he’s got nothing to complain about.  Except that he thinks Warren broke his jaw.  I say you didn’t break it well enough if he can still run his mouth about it.”

“I’d say not too.”  He sopped up some yolk with his bread heel.  He didn’t want to over-talk it, didn’t want John Ruth to get back to thinking he was too interested—even if what John Ruth thought he was interested in was that four thousand dollars.  Which seemed low to him for helping a sheriff into an early grave, but maybe Red Rock hadn’t liked the man too much.

He helped Charly and OB out that morning, fighting his way through the cold out to the stable.  He missed seeing Lash there in what’d been his usual stall; he’d have brought him an apple along with the hot mash, because that was his usual way, and he’d slipped one in his pocket going out the door.  And here he had an apple and no horse.  Not one marked as his own, anyway.  He settled for carving the apple up and sharing out the wedges of it amongst all those dumb unfamiliar horses looking at him with hope in their big brown eyes.

“You missing your own?” OB said.

“A bit.”

Charly looked across the stalls.  “Hell, I saw you come in on the coach, I didn’t even think about it.  Something happen to Lash?”

“Couldn’t make it through the weather.”  He stroked the nose of the white one: wasn’t its fault what color it was.

“You had that horse a long time, didn’t you?  Minnie said he was like your best friend.”

“Well, Minnie can get that sentimental about it if she wants, but I ain’t planning to.”  He said it in such a way as to put an end to the questions about his dead horse—twelve years he’d had old Lash—and started talking about other things instead.  The blizzard and when they thought it would break.  What Minnie was maybe going to serve up for supper.  Who was going to lose to Sweet Dave at chess.

And somehow from that they got to talking about Mannix.  Not so much the elephant in the room as the jackass chained up in the basement.

“He must be the loyal kind, I guess,” OB said.  “Breaking out his friend that way.”

Warren said, “More like the stupid kind, considering his friend wasn’t too loyal back.”  And he planned for that to be the end of the conversation.  He must have put that much across in his voice, because they let it lie.  Though maybe they just had the good sense not to find Chris Mannix too interesting.

“Sweet Dave says the storm should die down tomorrow,” Charly said.  “Maybe even tonight.”

“Sweet Dave even gotten up off his ass to look outside?”

“No.  But he’s got a sense about that shit.  Never known him to be wrong.”

And what did Charly know, Warren thought.  He hadn’t even been there a year.  He couldn’t have such a damn good estimate of Sweet Dave’s reliability.  It could be two nights more.  It could be three.

* * *

Mannix looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when Warren came down to him.  John Ruth had gotten some mistaken sense of pity and uncuffed him, letting him roam around the barren little basement and stretch his legs a bit; they just weighed the trapdoor down to keep him cooped up.

“How’d you get him to agree to that?” Warren said.  “You work your wiles on him off too?”

“No, I did not.  He was just acting like a white man.  Practicing a little _common decency_.”

“Mm-hmm.  And how much of that do you think he’d put into practice if he knew what you liked to get up to?  Or are you gonna waste my time pretending I came down here for anything else?”

“Damn, major,” Mannix said, “give a man a minute of fucking conversation first.”

It was funny seeing him with his hands out in front of him—lean, long fingers with a gunman’s calluses.  Ugly red abrasions on his wrists, bleeding through his white cuffs.  If he had to be unshackled, a thing Warren wasn’t conceding, it was good to see that hurt on him, at least.

“I ain’t that enamored of your idea of conversation, Chris Mannix.  But okay.  Let’s talk about, ah, Lance Lawson, wasn’t that his name?  I was just thinking that him leaving you high and dry with your hands in the air and John Ruth dragging you off in chains—now, that’s more my experience of what it means to act like a white man.  So I say you had it coming.  And aside from that, I find it pretty fucking hilarious.  This minute of conversation going the way you hoped it would?”

Mannix looked disgusted with him.  “About the way I _thought_ it would, anyhow.”

Warren got a laugh out of that and then lobbed the handcuffs at him.  “You can leave the post out of it, but get your hands behind your back.”

Mannix had let them fall to the dirt and now he scowled at them.  “Nope.  I just got out of those fucking things, you want me to put myself back in?”

“Yeah.  I think I used small enough words for you.”

They had themselves a little standoff there: Mannix glaring at him, him not caring.

He wasn’t going to go so far as to tell Mannix he’d leave if Mannix didn’t get himself tied up.  He didn’t think he had to stoop to it.

And in the end he was right: Mannix bent down slowly, picked the cuffs up off on the ground, and fixed his hands behind him.  Seeing him like that, seeing him do it to himself on nothing more than Warren’s say-so, spread something hot through Warren’s blood.  He stepped up close and ran his fingers through Mannix’s hair, skimmed his knuckles across the bruises on his jawline.  Mannix shuddered, his eyes closed.  Leaned into it like he always did.  This time Warren didn’t pull away too fast; he let Mannix enjoy himself a little.

“That’s good, Chris.”

But being benevolent didn’t suit him for long—never had.  So he took out his knife.  At first he liked the way Mannix’s eyes stayed on the blade, but then he decided he didn’t, decided Mannix’s attention should be reserved for other things.  He still had his scarf stowed away in his coat pocket, so he took that out and wound it around Mannix’s eyes.

Mannix stood still and let him do it, maybe hoping he’d get petted again.  Warren decided to disappoint him.

He combed the knife through Chris’s hair instead, just enough for Chris to feel the sharp edge against his scalp.

“I hunted down a whole lot of Indians way back when,” Warren said casually.  “But I never ran across much scalping, aside from white men who thought they were being funny, giving somebody a bit of turnabout.  I didn’t try it myself.”

Mannix seemed to be trying hard to stay still.  “I’d make an argument against you starting now.”

He pricked Mannix’s hairline just a little, just enough for him to feel a drop of warm blood running down his skin, just enough to get him to gasp.

“What if I did it to your friend?  I can get a bounty on a man with or without the top of his head.”

Mannix exhaled, low and ragged.  He was as hard as he’d been last night.  “Now you’re sweet-talking me, major.”

“You like that, huh?”  He trailed the knife down to Mannix’s heart.  One thrust would be all it would take to end him, and he could always say it had come about because John Ruth had left Mannix wandering around.  He thought about Mannix’s life-blood washing hot over his hands, Mannix not even able to see the knife.  He had his nice sweet fancies too.  “You been loyal to the wrong people all your life, Mannix.  And this is where it got you.  Right at the end of my knife with nobody-but-nobody coming to save your white ass.  I could cut your heart right out of you, and if I don’t, you owe that to _me_ , Mannix.  Nobody else.  You understand that?”

“I understand, major.”  It came out in a whisper.  He wasn’t even trying to fumble his way backwards, anything like that, which did lend credence to the notion that he got it, that he knew who was in charge.  For the first time in his whole damn life.  “I can owe you.  I got nobody else.”

Warren put his knife away.  Dangerously pleased.  He said, “Storm’s passing, Chris.  Tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, you’ll be gone.  I didn’t believe Sweet Dave on it at first, but I watched it the last few hours.  It’s going.  Just like you.”

“You could let that persuade you to stop wasting so much time,” Mannix said.

There really was something in him Warren almost liked, and it wasn’t too far from everything that made it so good to hurt him and would have made it good to kill him.

They had a rickety table down there, short in one leg and wobbly, so he got Mannix there and bent him over it.

“Anybody ever get their mouth on you down here, Mannix?”  He twisted one spit-wet finger into Mannix’s asshole as he asked the question.

“Fuck, major.  No.”  He sounded both appalled and hopeful.  “You offering? I just washed up this morning.”

“No.  Your ass ain’t that lucky.  Just informing you of pleasures you’re gonna have to live without.”

“Not for long,” Mannix said under his breath.

Warren didn’t do much to get him open—as far as he was concerned, if Mannix wanted cock so badly, he could take it however Warren was willing to give it to him—and he liked the pained sound Mannix let out through gritted-teeth, liked the way whatever discomfort there was didn’t stop Mannix from pushing back onto him and taking as much of him as he could.  He listened to the rattle-thump they made, the table leg against the floor.  Warren grabbed hold of one of Mannix’s cuffed hands and squeezed it hard, felt Mannix holding him back just about hard enough to break his bones. 

* * *

They had clear skies by two the next afternoon.  Enough time, John Ruth said, to get to Red Rock.  He’d hauled Mannix back upstairs with them and dumped a bucket of well-water over him in lieu of another bath—John Ruth’s nose wrinkled all the while like he could smell all the spunk and sweat on him—and given him breakfast.

“You see, that’s the kind of treatment you can get when you don’t squawk at me all the time,” John Ruth said.  “You get tended to almost like a man who deserves to sit at somebody’s breakfast table.”

Mannix considered this point, chewing a mouthful of porridge longer than any porridge had ever needed chewing, and than spat the whole bit of it onto John Ruth’s coat and took the ensuing beating with a smile.

OB drove them into town.

Warren made eight thousand dollars off his corpses and John Ruth made the four off turning in Mannix.

“That’s another advantage to bringing them in dead,” he said to John Ruth, when they were having dinner together two days later.  After Mannix’s trial was done, and the sooner he cleared that fact out of his head the better.  “Easier to cart around.”

“I don’t do the work because it’s easy,” John Ruth said.  “I do it to see them hang.  And I’ll be watching Mannix swing tomorrow, if you want to come with me.”

Warren shrugged.  He took a bite of potato.  Thought about Mannix spitting porridge all over John Ruth—he’d almost laughed at that.  “I believe I’ve got the time.”

He hadn’t spoken a word to Mannix since that last night in the basement, Mannix tight around him, shut up in the darkness where Warren had put him.  It had seemed like a good way to leave things.  But what the hell, he could see Chris Mannix off, find out if he got that drop he surely didn’t deserve.  And it’d be best to watch him die, to know he’d boxed their fucked-up interlude up for good.  He’d been off since he’d left him in that jail; he kept feeling like he’d dropped something.  He preferred to think it was only Lash's company he was missing.

So he turned up, his Union coat brushed clean and neat and good as new, and he watched Mannix spot him, watched Mannix lift his head a little higher when he did.

* * *

“You can have the ride,” John Ruth said, “but I don’t know as you’ll much like the company.”

Warren blinked at that: felt snow in his eyelashes, the scratch of his scarf against his face.  “What?”

John Ruth seemed to take it as Warren not hearing him over the wind, so he shouted it this time.

This time.  Warren tried to put his thoughts in order, a tough fucking task when order seemed suddenly hard to come by.  He’d hitched this particular ride before, hightailing it to Minnie’s before the storm.  They’d made it, and onto Red Rock afterwards.  Where he’d watched Mannix hang—badly—and now—

“I guess I can handle about any company over freezing to death,” he said.  His voice gave none of this strangeness away; he was too used to lying to white men to do a bad job of it now.

This time he got the guarantee of his ride all sorted out before he even headed into the coach.  He put it off, lashing the corpses to the roof, trying to think.  He did a lot of it but wasn’t sure it got him very far.

He climbed into the stagecoach and saw Mannix staring back at him.  Mannix was clearly trying to think too, and the look on his face showed the exertion it cost him, showed how little he was used to doing it.  His mouth was opening and closing like a fish’s.

“Major,” Mannix said finally.

Warren didn’t know whether or not to tip the jackass off or not.  It was plain John Ruth and OB thought this day felt fresh as a daisy; it seemed to be only the two of them who remembered the shit that had gone down during the storm.  Until he knew more than that, maybe he’d just go on letting Mannix wonder if he was in this boat all by his lonesome.

So he looked at John Ruth.  “Who the hell’s this?”

“You don’t remember me?”

John Ruth said, “I guess you ain’t as famous as you’d like, Mannix.  Though, Warren, you got good reason to know this one—four thousand dollars on his head for killing the sheriff of Red Rock.  Chris Mannix, late of his even later daddy’s Mannix’s Marauders.  You’d have heard of him.  Erskine.”

“Yeah, I heard of Erskine Mannix.  Never troubled myself to learn the names of all his tagalong kin.”

Mannix slumped down in his seat.  That one black eye.  He didn’t have anything on him that Warren had given him and that seemed a crying shame.  He studied them a while and then his mouth fish-hooked to one side, a flat little grimace.

“Look at that,” John Ruth said, chuckling.  “Guess you broke his heart.”

* * *

He tried to work out the whole rest of the day just like he had the first time.  He showed off the Lincoln letter, he helped Minnie with the stew—and he made damn sure that come midnight, Chris Mannix would be waiting for him downstairs.

Warren climbed down there and looked him over.  He’d been silent most of the day, so he’d picked up fewer bruises this time around.  He only looked half-dressed without them and Warren itched to rough him up some more, get him suitable and familiar again.  He held off for now.  Time having twisted around like a drunken snake to pitch them all the way back here, he figured he had bigger concerns.

Mannix said, “I know you remember me, major, goddammit.”  He had spittle on his lips, like he was so angry about Warren ignoring him all day that he’d worked himself up into a froth.

“I didn’t forget you coming down that ladder, if that’s what you mean.”  He circled around Mannix, lifting the lantern: he at least got a glimpse of Mannix’s wrists before Mannix swiveled around to keep him in sight.  “You about worked yourself raw there, white boy.  You’ll cut your hands off, you keep tugging like that.”

“You black bastard, I ain’t saying shit to you if you don’t start being straight with me.”

That tickled Warren so much that he couldn’t hide it.  “Shit, Chris Mannix, is that supposed to persuade me?  I don’t remember you saying a word worth me hearing it.  Best use of your mouth was something else.”

Mannix surged at him, like he’d gone crazy enough to try to bite him—sort of completing the rabid look—and Warren caught him by the shoulders and stopped him.  He felt the tension in Chris ebb just a little.

Not just desperate for cock, he decided.  Not just desperate for conversation, either.  Desperate for—well, Warren hadn’t decided that part yet.  He had the idea it might be better not to know.

“Easy.”  He gripped Chris’s shoulders a little harder.  “You lunge at me like that again and I’ll put a bullet between your eyes, I don’t care what kind of joke I’m pulling on you.  But this one I’ll give you.”

Mannix said all manner of obscenities against him and Warren let him get away with it for a while, till he strayed to that Reb shit, and then he put an end to it by putting his hand on Mannix’s throat and giving him a squeeze.  That quieted him down quick.

“I guess I didn’t have to fuck with you,” Warren said.  “All things considered.”

“Why did you, then?”

“It did provide some entertainment.  And I don’t trust you, Mannix.”

“So you trust me now?”  Mannix perked up at that.

“No,” Warren said, both because it was true and because he liked dashing Mannix’s hopes.  “More like I decided circumstances were such that it didn’t matter if I did or not.”  He wasn’t going to get into it, because Mannix sure as hell didn’t deserve to be privy to his innermost considerations, but it was more that he wasn’t the sharing kind.  Not the honest kind either.  He got by on lies and polish and care plastered over a hell of a lot of good old-fashioned cunning, and he hadn’t stayed alive as long as he had, still a man in a world that wanted to make him not one, by showing his hand.  By being anything other than better and smarter than any other son-of-a-bitch in the room.

Mannix sized him up, looking like he thought he knew something he surely didn’t, and then he said, “Are you gonna uncuff me or not?”

“You’re mistaken as to John Ruth’s character, you think he turns over those keys to anybody else.”

Mannix showed off those big teeth of his.  “Oh, you really trying to tell me you can’t pick a lock?”

He supposed he wasn’t.  And while John Ruth had swept the whole cellar clear arounud where Mannix’s post was, the junk of running the Haberdashery was still all down there; they weren’t short on wire.  He got Mannix unfixed in a minute or two.

“You did a number on yourself,” Warren said, tapping one finger against the blood on one of Mannix’s wrists.  “What were you trying to do, pull your arms off?”

“Why not?  I wouldn't need them to get upstairs and kick you half to death for fucking ignoring me.”  He pulled away.  “And I don’t like having the damned things on.”

“Most folks don’t.  Not that that ever dissuaded anybody down in your neck of the woods.”  And he’d enjoy getting Mannix back in those cuffs even more now that he knew Mannix had such an antipathy to them.  That lock would have one sweet click to it.

Mannix was frowning but then he said, “So what’s going on, you figure?”  Changing the subject.  “The last thing I remember’s dying.”

“Yeah.  You dying’s the last thing I remember too.”  He didn’t like that even a little.  He more or less wanted Chris Mannix gone; having his own life tethered to Mannix’s, tethered to any white man’s, didn’t appeal to him.  Never mind how Mannix’s throat had felt in his hand, as right and necessary as a bullet in a gun.

“I saw you out there, watching.”

 _You did some pretty dance steps,_ Warren almost said, but instead he just nodded.

“Well, thanks for sticking around.”  He sounded entirely sincere.  “Not like I had anybody else to show up and give me a proper send-off.”

“If I’d known it meant so much to you, Chris, I’d have been miles away.”

Mannix heaved a sigh at him and then said, “So if you died, would I wake up back on that stagecoach?”

Warren found some small consolation in that prospect.  It suited him to think that Mannix was at least tied to him in return, that his death could drag Mannix’s about in its dust if it happened to pull ahead.  “Since finding out would mean me dying, I don’t know and I’d as soon not test the theory.  And I ain’t willing to say yet that you dying had shit to do with me coming back here.  Timing’s suspicious, yeah, but I got no reason in the world to care what happens to you.  If I’m gonna have to start, I want some solid motherfucking proof on my hands.”

“What, you mean you’re gonna let me die _again_?”

“You know I am.”

There was something fiendishly appealing about putting that sulk on Mannix’s face, about telling him he was bound for painful death and wringing nothing more out of him than that.  “Major, this plan of yours is _horseshit_.  I died once _already_.  How many times you gonna make me do it?”

“I’d say as many times as I like seeing it, but if we do wind up back here every time, that could take us through fucking eternity.  So—three or so.  You hang two more times in Red Rock, I’ll believe I need to keep you from hanging.  Then I figure I’ll test out shooting you in the head.  You’ll like it better than the hanging, anyway, it’ll be quicker.  We come back again after that—I’ll get you out of here and we’ll part ways.”

“I don’t see why you can’t just try saving my life _first_.”

“I’m not gonna save your life if I don’t have to,” Warren said.  “All the motherfuckers I’ve seen dead, all the ones I killed, why should you be the goddamn exception to the rule?  And why should I be the one who has to give a damn?  I lost my horse this morning and I didn’t wake up in time to spare _him_ , and I liked him a hell of a lot more than I like you.”

“Well, you can just go fuck your dead horse, then, if you liked him so well.”

“No, it’s only you hillbilly crackers that get up to that kind of thing.”

Maybe it was the fucking that had done it, actually.  Maybe they’d given this to each other like a dose of clap.  He’d been with handful of men in his day and Mannix evidently sucked every dick he'd so much as laid eyes on, so they both would’ve had friends killed, soon or late.  Plenty of them.  Hell, Warren knew more dead men than living ones.  So neither of them had rung this particular bell before, even under similar circumstances.  But here they were, two killers in a storm, fucking in a fucked up way while death itself rattled the windows.  It wasn’t much of an idea to hang his hat on, but right now it was the only one he had.

He said, “I’ve got to lay some more bruises on you.  Make it look good for John Ruth.”

To his credit, Mannix accepted the turnaround in topics and held still for him—though given that he seemed to like whatever Warren’s hands did to him, rough or not, maybe he didn’t deserve that credit after all.

By the time Warren was done, Mannix looked like he’d take his clothes off then and there.

Warren held up the handcuffs and Mannix nodded eagerly, went right over to the post and put his hands behind him without even being told.

Warren snapped them into place and stepped back.  Grinned at Mannix’s eagerness.

“You have a good night, Chris.”

His face fell so fast Warren was surprised he didn’t hear it hitting the floor.  “What the _fuck_?”

“I didn’t promise you a damn thing.  I beat the hell out of you and then chained you back up.  You getting from that to the prospect of a good time, well, that’s a winding path to take.”

“Yeah, one we _took_ _already_.”

“It’s another thing I’m testing out,” Warren said.  “Whether or not abstaining from the questionable pleasures of fucking a Reb has any effect on all this.  I mean, for all I know, I'm stuck reliving all this just to correct my mistakes.”

“So I’m supposed to die blue-balled because you want to test a fucking _theory_?”

“Yeah,” Warren said.  “You picked up on it right away.  Guess you’re not as stupid as you look.”

“I let you chain me up again!”

“And that was real cute, Chris.  You’re well-behaved when you put your mind to it.  I’m sure your daddy’s proud of you.”

“See if I fuck you next time around,” Mannix said.  “See if I do anything for you—ahh.”  He dragged the sound out as Warren pressed his thumb into the hinge of his jaw, opening up his mouth.  Mannix had gotten down to only being half-hard, his ire being what it was, but now he was up again, his cock plainly begging for it.  Seeing him like that made Warren want some kind of mean indulgence, made him think of perversions even he hadn’t come up with before.

He said, “If you can think of a compromise, Mannix, I’ll let you have it.”

He wondered if Mannix would scrape up enough dignity to tell him to go to hell.  He’d have been amused by that—but all the same, when he could see Mannix working his way up to it, he slipped his fingers into Mannix’s mouth instead.  Mannix sucked on them like he just couldn’t help himself.

Warren pulled away from.  He wanted to leave him wanting.

“Then again, you don’t have any thoughts on the matter, I’ll just go upstairs.”

He watched Mannix’s scruples, such as they were, skitter out of sight, driven to the corners of his mind by that bright wanting in his eyes.  “Can I suck you?”

He was tempted, but he figured it would cross the line, make it too hard to tell whether fucking Mannix made a difference or not.  He shook his head and something about the crestfallen look, the kicked-puppy nature of it, made him say, “But it’s cold down here.  You could keep me warm a while.”

This time he didn’t worry about Mannix getting together any shred of dignity: he nodded like he was going to jostle his head off his shoulders.  Knelt down quick.

Warren would have gotten onto him more about how impatient he was, but his mouth had dried up a little at seeing Mannix hit the floor for him like that.  So instead he just opened up his trousers, let the chilly air of the cellar settle uncomfortably on his hot skin, let Mannix wait there openmouthed while the cold softened him a little.  Then he let Mannix have what he was after.

That mouth was like hot velvet, nothing but soft wet sweetness.  Mannix closed his eyes, which freed Warren up to look at him more than he would have otherwise.  To look at the shadows the lantern-light made on his face and the spit-slickness of those widened lips.  The sharpness of his cheekbones, the set of his jaw.  He wasn’t bad-looking, not entirely, not with Warren’s cock in his mouth and him holding it like it was precious treasure.  And he was good about it, too, not sucking or letting his teeth get in the way.  He looked like he would have been content to hold Warren’s cock like that right up until they put the noose around his neck.

Warren touched his hair a little, smoothing it back.  Did it mostly to keep his own hands occupied.

“You like this, Chris?”

Mannix nodded around him, the movement gentle.

“You live,” Warren said, “and I’ll let you do it next time, too.”

* * *

The second time he watched Mannix die, he was a little drunk; he’d had a couple brandies with his breakfast and they’d smoothed out the world’s rougher edges.  Without the brandy everything had seemed a little fucked up: every light had a glare at the heart of it, every shadow some kind of pit.  Even cushioned by the booze, he felt wrong, almost like somebody’d left a knife stuck between his ribs.  And as the hangman pulled the noose tight on Mannix’s throat, put the rope over the purple mark Warren had left there, he had a godawful sour taste in his mouth, like for all he’d paid for that brandy he might as well have been drinking the cheapest wine there ever was.

He’d given the hangman twenty dollars to make sure Mannix’s neck broke, but the man had played him for it: there just wasn’t enough drop to the gallows to manage it.  So he watched Mannix kick a while, confusing the hell out of some fly that was buzzing around the sole of one of his boots.  He must have stepped in something.  Then Mannix’s feet stilled and the fly landed.

John Ruth said, “You see, Warren.  There’s an element of satisfaction to it, seeing justice get done, letting the law do its job.”

Warren hadn’t asked.  “I get more satisfaction doing justice myself,” he said, like the law, for him, had ever had anything to do with it.

* * *

“You can have the ride,” John Ruth said, “but I don’t know as you’ll much like the company.”

“I suppose I’ll do all right,” Warren said.

* * *

Another slow strangulation had put Mannix in a pissy mood.  No wide-eyed swooning over Warren’s cock for him tonight, not even when Warren had been nice enough to go ahead and talk John Ruth into leaving him freely roaming the basement from the start.  Ungrateful jackass.

Hell, he had gone so far as to get Mannix soap and water when John Ruth wouldn't have brought it to him till the next morning—though admittedly that last bit was purely selfish.  Squeaky clean, Mannix was whiter than ever, his scrubbed-up ass almost glowing like the moon, and Warren had plans for him.

Warren got him bent over that crooked table, got him leaning on his elbows.  He’d found a couple good, long pieces of rattan cane down there in amongst all the junk.  Somebody’d been thinking of making a chair out of the stuff, by the look of it, but the job had gotten abandoned somewhere along the line.

“Too brittle now, probably,” Warren said, sliding his hand across the wood to take the dust off it.  “Even if you wet it, you couldn’t get it to bend enough for a good weave.  Though, hell, this is a shade too thick for that anyhow.  Useless in the natural way of things.  But it’ll work just fine for you.”

Mannix’s pale ass clenched tight at that, but he didn’t come up off the table.  He just said, “I ain’t hanging again.”

He remembered that fly crawling across Mannix’s boot.  “I might not need you to.”

“Something’s happening to me,” Mannix said.

“Something’s about to, yeah.”

“You know what I mean.”  Mannix twisted his head around and looked at him over his shoulder, and it was close to endearing how he still hadn’t budged from how Warren had put him.  “Don’t you?  I keep having these fucked up dreams—and when I was in jail and you were off wherever you were, sitting on your ass all day like I wasn’t about to hang for the second _goddamn_ time, you were like… like something I was trying to remember.  How it is when something keeps coming back to you and you’re racking your brains out on it but it’s not there.”

“That’s pretty,” Warren said.  “You know, I always heard something about men like yourself, poetic like that, liking to take it up the ass.”

“Fuck you, major.”

He snapped the cane across Mannix’s ass, nice and hard, and Mannix yelled at it, loud as a gunshot.  Warren grabbed his hair and pulled him up and back and they waited like that through a minute or so of rustling upstairs, him tightening his hold anytime Mannix so much as twitched.  Finally he let go.

“They’re expecting to hear something, from time to time,” Warren said.  “So they won’t come down now.  But if you can’t take it like a man and keep your mouth shut—”

“I can.  I swear.”  He got back the way he’d been before, ass shamefully out, begging for that cane across it.  No wonder Mannix knew his way around cock so well.  The way he took it, the way he took everything, even a more natural man would have trouble turning him away.

But anybody else seeing him like this, all needy and with his cock leaking at the thought of getting even a tenth the beating he deserved—the thought rankled.  Yeah, something was happening to them both.  Warren should have stayed another day in that shithole of a hotel he’d been in—that would have been enough to see the storm coming, clue him in that he’d better wait.  He would never have even met Chris Mannix at all.

Then again, he thought, going back to what he was doing, listening to the crack of the cane on Mannix’s skin, the hard huffs of Mannix’s breath as each stroke landed, there was something to be said for all this.  Any other arrangement, he’d have had to find one person to fuck and another to hate and another couple more to hurt however it suited him.

And another one, maybe, for whatever else there was in this.

He'd maybe been in traps he'd liked less than this one.  But he didn’t like being trapped at all—not on some godforsaken plantation and not in a prison cell and not in a stretch of days and Chris Mannix’s company, either.  So he wasn’t going to get to feeling good about this, not ever.

But leaving those welts on Mannix’s bare white ass did help a little.  He liked the way they lined up, overlapping a little at the edges: he'd always taken pride in doing a thing well.  When the cane finally broke, he tossed it aside and brought the lamp over instead, just to spend some time admiring his handiwork.

“You look good all striped-up like this, Chris,” he said, almost tenderly.  He traced one of the welts and watched Mannix’s reddened, bruised-up skin twitch under his fingertip.

“You just like seeing me on the losing end of things,” Mannix said.  His voice was high and tight, full of pain and hard-cocked need.  “Are you gonna fuck me or not?”

He hadn’t gotten around to thinking about it yet—knowing he’d hit Mannix hard enough to break the cane in two had almost been enough to get him off then and there—but hearing Mannix all but beg for it was enough to persuade him.

“Shame we don’t have a bed.”

“Why, Major Marquis.  You getting all delicate on me?”

He smacked Chris open-palmed and hard right against all those welts and Chris just pushed back into his hand, letting Warren cup that hot flesh of his.  It was a challenge to punish him when he could turn out to react like that.

“I was just thinking of my back, hillbilly.  But if you want delicate, climb all the way up on that table.”

“It’ll break.  I’m about thinking you just like breaking things, me included.”  But he did it, his muscles tensing up every time the table teetered.

“There you go,” Warren said.  He stroked one wet finger between Chris’s ass cheeks and listened to the sound it wrung out of him.  “Laid out like a good spread waiting for somebody to taste you.”  He held Chris open—it was a good, brazen pose, showing off just how much Mannix was his to fool around with—and leaned in.  He licked across Chris's hole and all around it, holding him firmly in place all the while.

“Oh, sweet fuck, major—”

He didn't especially like doing it—he wasn't the giving type—but he liked putting Chris through the indignity of it, through this exposure and helplessness somehow even less proper for a man than getting fucked was.  So he went on, making Chris wet there, making him sloppy with it; he felt him twist and listened to him cuss and beg for more.

Warren pulled back, running the back of his hand across his mouth.  “There you go,” he said, slipping a finger into Chris as easy as anything.  “You're more than ready now.  You don’t get sucked, Chris Mannix, because what's in that for me?  I put my mouth on you, it’s just gonna be so you can take cock, even harder and even more of it than you thought.  So I got you all slicked up, because I’m feeling nice.”  He pushed another finger in and rubbed where he knew it would make Mannix fall apart.  Maybe he did like breaking things after all.

He got Mannix down off the table and fucked him, his ass hot from Warren’s caning and wet from his tongue.  Warren had gotten more of him than anybody else ever had or ever would, even with Mannix thinking he was so wise to the ways of the world.  He wrapped his hand around Mannix’s cock, dragged his thumb across the leaking head of it, got him off so easily it had to be embarrassing for him.

He concentrated on how hard he could fuck Chris without even hurting him much, and all because he'd treated Chris like getting fucked was just what Chris was for, had licked him out the way a man licked a whore; he concentrated on Chris knowing all that just as well as he did, Chris not even being able to be distracted from it now that he'd already come.  Warren held his hand against those stove-hot welts as he came.

Afterwards, he rolled them a couple cigarettes and they smoked, him sitting and Mannix standing, Mannix _unable_ to sit, which amused him.

He’d needed that, he thought, breathing in the taste of Minnie’s Red Apple tobacco.  It had cleared his mind out a little.

“Yeah,” he said, out loud this time.  “Something’s happening to us.”

“Good to see you finally getting sensible,” Mannix said.

“Careful there, cracker.  I was about to say I don’t think we’ll get anything out of you hanging again, either, but I could change my mind.”

“Well, don't and I'll sing hallelujah.”  It didn’t take much to get Mannix in good spirits, evidently, because just like that, he was back to being frisky.  “You still gonna try shooting me?”

“No.  Much as I’d like to put a bullet in your head, I don’t think it’ll do any good either.  And I ain’t thinking of sitting through endless conversations in that damn stagecoach just for the pleasure of it, not when there’s plenty of shit I can do to you that you’ll live through.”

Mannix grinned at him.  “Now you’re talking.”

* * *

The problem was, he spent plenty of time in that stagecoach all the same.

He started off peaceful, aiming to minimize their hassles.  He tried buying out Mannix’s bounty, going on and on about wanting to kill the man himself while John Ruth looked a sanctimonious shade of disapproving and Mannix did his best to look nervous and not like he could get hard then and there just from Warren talking about him.  Warren took that tack different ways for five whole blizzards' worth of time, and he got nowhere.  He offered to pay the four thousand and then eventually he offered to pay all the way up to six, but there he drew a line in the sand.  When he wouldn't go above it even on their fifth try, Mannix lost his temper and forgot himself.

“You’ve got eight thousand dollars strapped to the fucking roof!  Dammit, you won’t even trade the dead men you’ve got _on_ you for me?”

“No, he won’t,” John Ruth said.  “And I’m confounded why you’re getting all irate about it.  You know the desecrations he could put you throw that nobody’d give two shits about?”

“Oh, like you don’t turn him over to me every damn time for anything short of my fucking _murder_ ,” Mannix snapped at him.

“What the hell is he talking about?” John Ruth said, as purely befuddled as anybody Warren had ever seen.

“I don’t know.”  Warren leveled a glare at Mannix.  “What the hell are you talking about, Mannix?”

“Just put one between my eyes,” Mannix said truculently.  “I don’t feel like sitting around all week waiting.”

He didn’t, though, he just waited for Mannix to calm down and for John Ruth to have time to decide his bounty maybe hadn’t gone full raving lunatic on him after all.  He could understand Mannix not wanting yet another rope around his neck, but that didn’t mean he was going to plug him right there in the open and maybe get shot himself for his trouble.

Besides, whatever he'd said before, he was almost sure Mannix's death at the hangman's hands never stuck, his death at Warren's would.  He couldn't explain it, but Mannix was his man now, maybe even more than he’d ever been his daddy’s son.  Warren had said it the first time around—Mannix owed his life to him, not to anybody else.  Time itself had acknowledged that.  And if that was true, he could snuff that life out if it pleased him.  He wasn’t making that call just yet.

Though that was a bad last set of days.  John Ruth got skittish about Mannix and kept him cuffed to him through the whole storm.  Warren never even got to lay a finger on him, and watching him die that time was harder than ever.

* * *

No more haggling, then.  They took a few blizzards to rest up.

They bided their time, fucking around at night in the basement—the rattan cane, whole again, brought back in all its glory—while Warren played nice upstairs during the day.  A lifetime of practice had made him good at seeming guileless whenever he chose, so it wasn't any trouble to make conversation over breakfast like he hadn’t seen the dawn in by having Mannix lick his boots clean.  He told war stories, speculated on the weather like he didn't know just about every snowflake by now, and played chess with Sweet Dave.  He did all the things you could do in a well-lighted room.

What he and Mannix had down in the basement was of a different variety, even when it was only talk.

“You never did tell me how many men you killed, major.”

He'd had a reason for not, he knew that, but he couldn't remember it now.  “Thirty-seven Union men in Wellenbeck, forty-seven Rebs I hope were your close personal friends.  Twelve or thirteen bounties a year, generally, since I took up doing this, which I did the year after the war.  Eighteen, nineteen redskins before all that, forty-three more white men in the war I’m sure of, another six or so I ain’t.  And eleven others.  You can do the math yourself, if you can figure it in your head.  I ain’t getting you pen and paper for it.”

Mannix whistled.  “That’s something, major.  Damn, I bet there’ve been plagues killed fewer people.”

“Now I already knew you had a sweet mouth, hillbilly, but now you’re laying it on too thick.”  He tapped his ash out onto the ground, pleased despite himself at Mannix looking at him like that.

“Who were the eleven?”

“Special cases.”

“What kind of special cases?”

“Man who thought he owned me, for one.”

“Now that don’t surprise me at all.”

“Another was a cracker I met in the woods just after the war.  He said a lot of shit I’ve already heard come out of your mouth.  Nobody was around, so I taught him a lesson on that.  And the rest were a bunch of white boys also like yourself, true believers in the Cause who came marching up to my place thinking they’d come away rich and full of glory.”

“Bet you showed them.”  He sounded suitably respectful.  No ire this time around about Wellenbeck or any of the rest of it, not even any ruffled feathers.  “We ever get out of this, you could come with me.”

“Me come with you,” Warren said, hoping his tone implied how he felt about that idea, that order of precedence.

Mannix wasn’t much for implication, apparently.  “Well, I've got something to do, you know.  I got to go kill Lance, if he ain’t dead already.  You understand—special cases.  Even you got to acknowledge it’s a unique aggravation, having a disloyal fucking friend, having somebody run out on you.”

“A bit,” Warren allowed.  He wasn’t much for allegiances, but he’d had a few that had stuck, had a few promises over the years that he’d kept, mostly to folks who were long gone now.  “Only I don’t pick them disloyal, so I don’t ever have to find out.  But yeah, I understand you wanting to track him down.  That still doesn’t make killing him my business.”

“I’m loyal,” Mannix said, like there was only one part of Warren’s answer he’d heard.  He tossed his cigarette away from him and knelt down over Warren, undoing his trousers, starting to stroke his cock.  His face was calm, serious.  “I wouldn’t run out on you, major.”

* * *

Eventually, when they got back their noses back to the grindstone, Warren tried getting him out of the Red Rock jail instead of out of Minnie's.  It went wrong from the beginning.  The town was still stung by losing Lawson and too averse to losing the man they felt had humiliated them in the eyes of the world, like anybody anywhere gave a shit about Red Rock at all, let alone the whole fucking saga of what had become of the town’s sheriff and his killer and his killer’s friend.  They’d deputized half a dozen burly dumbasses to stand around holding guns, just in case Lawson showed up to spring Chris himself.

The hell of it was, he’d spotted the deputies right away.  Red Rock hadn’t shelled out for Pinkertons, just muscle, so they stood out plain as day.

So he figured the whole operation was a bust and they might as well suffer through a few more blizzards screwing and planning.  He’d been leaning against a doorframe opposite the jail, sizing it up, and all he did was come up off it—a mite too fast, it seemed, for some trigger-happy bastard across the street.  The jumpy son-of-a-bitch started firing at him right then and there, fanning his gun like a damn amateur.  It was dummb luck alone that sent one of those wild-fired bullets into Warren’s chest, and he resented it.  It wasn’t the death he’d hoped for, paying for something he hadn’t even done just because some motherfucker didn’t know what he was doing.

And it wasn’t a clean shot, either.  He lay there in the street and died for what felt like hours, his breath thick with his own blood, him choking on it.  It felt like the man had set a blacksmith’s anvil down on his chest and the pressure of it was slowly cracking him open.

There was a whole crowd of deputies standing above him.

“I think you fucked up, Jed,” one of them said to the other.  “He came in with that other bounty hunter, Mr. Ruth.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“Well,” the first one said, “maybe Ruth won’t kick up a fuss about it.”  He bent down and peered at Warren’s face.  “I mean, he’s gone.”

Way far off, he could hear Mannix.  Mannix yelling up a storm.

* * *

“You can have the ride,” John Ruth said, “but I don’t know as you’ll much like the company.”

Warren barely realized he was alive, alive and back before the blizzard, when Mannix fucking propelled himself out the stagecoach and into the snow, dragging John Ruth along with him: he crashed into Warren hard, his one free hand up against his chest like he needed to feel for himself that Warren was whole again.

He only had a second of Mannix mashed up tight against him like that before Ruth clubbed Mannix down.

“Dammit, Warren,” John Ruth said, panting and leaning down to deliver a kick to Mannix’s ribs.  “Not like I didn’t know the two of you would have it in for each other, but I can’t have that shit.  He almost tore my goddamn arm off.  Now, you can come aboard, but this all stops here.  You want to get him back for that, you’re gonna have to wait until we get to Minnie’s Haberdashery.  And _you_ ,” he added to Mannix, “I hear one word out of you or get so much as a _rattle_ on these cuffs, I’ll put a bullet right through your belly, good and slow.”

He tugged Mannix upright.

“I ain’t banged up at all,” Warren said, talking to Mannix even if his eyes were on Ruth.  “So it's no problem.  We can wait until Minnie’s.”

Mannix hitched his chin up in the slightest of nods, playing at being sly even though he was clearly out of his fucking mind, jumping out of the coach that way, even if seeing that stunt had made Warren especially partial to him.  He needed it to be this way, he imagined—needed Mannix to be the one to feel this thing between them more.

He came down to the basement early that night, just as soon as everybody else was asleep.

“I heard them shoot you,” Mannix said.

“Then you heard right.”  He uncuffed him and let Mannix feel him up again, almost shyly this time, slipping his hand between Warren’s coat and his shirt, his palm hot even with the cotton still between them.  “You worried you’d hang for good then, huh?”

He knew better than that, but he still liked seeing Mannix’s eyes get big and round at it.

“No, sir.  I just thought you was a goner—and there I was, locked the hell up, not able to kill those _sons-of-bitches_.”

He went on pressing, just because.  “Now, I could have sworn killing me was just about a lifelong dream of you and your whole inbred family tree.  What happened to your convictions, Mannix?”  He took Mannix’s chin in his hand and held it, feeling the soft underside, the throat that had been marked up with rope again and again.  “What about _that_ loyalty?”

“Like you give a shit if it ain’t to you.”

True enough.  As far as he was concerned, Mannix could kill his whole white trash family and spit on their graves, could do it for any reason at all; he could break every oath he’d ever made on a stack of Bibles.  None of it mattered to him—not the virtue, not the vice.  And not Mannix's character, if he even had such a thing.  Warren just cared about winning, with Mannix both the loser and the dubious fucking prize.

But he looked good right now, Warren would admit.  He looked like something worth having.

Warren said, “I did some thinking on our ride, came up with a new plan.  There’s a line running from the front door of this place to the stable.  So before John Ruth comes down to fetch you up, the night before the blizzard stops, I’ll let you out.  You walk soft until you’re outside, and then you follow that line.  Leave tracks.  And then, _not_ leaving tracks, find someplace to hide _not_ in the stable.”

“In the middle of a fucking blizzard?”

“It’ll be dying down by then, and we'll leave it as late as we can.  Don’t take one of the horses, you’ll only get it killed.  Bury yourself in a snowdrift, wait it out.  Wait it out a long, long time, boy, long enough that even John Ruth gives up on looking for you and writes you off as dead and frozen.”

Mannix said, “You won’t know where I’ll be,” like that was a real objection.

The problem was it might have been.  He’d had a bad enough time being split from Mannix even when he’d known just where to find him.  Having him out of pocket for days, starving in some snowbank, could turn that nagging feeling he’d been getting into something worse.

But it still seemed like the best course of action, so he said, “I can live with that.”

Mannix blew him again that night and held him in his mouth for a long time afterwards, like he was storing up the taste and feel of him for later.

* * *

Oh, John Ruth shouted his head off when he found Mannix missing, but he never suspected Warren of having a thing to do with it.  He was still a man in an orderly world.  And in an orderly world, one where everything ticked on as it was supposed to, never running backwards, never roping one man’s fate to another’s, the idea of Marquis Warren and Chris Mannix working together didn’t hold water.

“He must have liked his prospects of freezing to death better than the hangman’s noose,” Warren said, sipping his coffee, thinking of Mannix’s warm mouth on his cock.  The twinge he’d worried about was there—almost enough to make him sick to his stomach—but he wouldn’t give into it.  He was going to eat his breakfast like a man without any trouble on his mind at all.  “Not to put too fine a point on it or rub it in, but this is another reason why you don’t try to bring them in alive.  Dead men don’t do any lockpicking.”

“I ain’t gonna let one lost bastard in all the years I’ve been doing this change my ways for me,” John Ruth said.  Grumpy and mean, but Warren sympathized with the position.  Yeah, he wouldn’t have changed either.

The lonely ache cut out about an hour after they got to Red Rock.  He had eight thousand dollars in his pocket, enough to buy John Ruth a drink as consolation for his troubles, and he'd done it and was sipping gin—he was dead tired of their brandy by now—when the tug of Mannix not being with him suddenly let go.

His hand tightened around the glass, but that was all.  He didn’t think he showed it any other way, at least not enough for John Ruth to ask him about it.

So that was it, then.  No more mystical shit.  No slick tightness to being in the same room together, like just having Mannix where he was supposed to be was almost the same as being inside him.

Whatever they’d fucked their way into, they’d worked their way out of.  Both still alive, presumably.  Both sure to go their separate ways.  He didn’t know how long Mannix would wait in whatever burrow he’d dug, though probably not as long as he should, not with him being impatient like he was and new to the idea that the world was unfriendly to him.  But if he got some distance, got out of Wyoming, he could maybe live until old age or sheer stupidity did him in.  Either way, Warren wasn’t going to wait around for him.  He wasn't going to look for him.

Saving Chris Mannix's life didn't oblige him to be in it.

So he didn’t track him down.  But he _did_ turn up Lance Lawson, just outside of Saratoga, and he weighed a thousand dollars against pure and simple pleasure and let pleasure come out ahead; he did things you didn’t do to a man if you were going to ever turn his body over to the law.  Buried him in a shallow grave where the animals would pick at him.

He spent some more time in Red Rock, where passions had cooled and there were no longer so many bumbling fools dressed up like deputies, but he couldn’t turn up good old itchy-trigger-finger Jed.

He was leaving Red Rock, winding along the route to Minnie’s, when Chris Mannix ran up to his horse waving his arms around like he’d caught on fire.

Warren pulled up.  He ignored the return of that hand-in-glove feeling—it was a sham.  They weren’t back to repeating their days, so there was no reason for him to care.  “What?”

“You’re a hard man to find, major.  No wonder nobody ever got that head off your shoulders.”

“It pays to not have a fixed address.”

“You gonna come down off that horse or just make me stand here craning my neck up at you?”

“The second one.  And what the hell are you doing so close to Red Rock?  All that dying steal your sense of self-preservation?  They’d still love to get a rope around your neck, you give them a gift-wrapped fucking opportunity.”

“I _know_ you go to Red Rock and Minnie’s,” Mannix said, sensibly enough.  Even though none of this made sense.  “I didn’t know where else you might lay your head—and I went all over first looking for you.  _I_ don't make a living finding people, you know, so I think I did all right.”

“I’ll at least give you that you were smart enough to have lurked out on the trail, not gone into Red Rock proper.”

Mannix grinned.  “I did go in once.  Just that one time, though.”

“It’s still a novelty being back to doing anything the one time,” Warren said.  “But that’s me reminiscing.  Okay, if you went in even once, I take back what I said about you being smart enough.  That's my fault for jumping to conclusions when I should have known better.  And the whole plan didn’t have much to say for it, either, because I spent so much time in Minnie’s and here that I’m sick of this whole part of the country.  I only came back to see if I could made the acquaintance of that fellow who shot me.”

“Killed you,” Mannix said, his smile suddenly turning sharp as a razor.  “The fellow who killed you slow, I seem to recall.  You hurt a long time.”

He almost asked how Mannix, cooped up in his cell, had known anything about it, but he guessed he knew.  He’d felt it every time Mannix had died, felt it worse every time.  “Yeah, I did.  Of course, he wouldn’t know why I’d want to acquaint him with the same kind of feeling, but then again, you crackers are always confused as to why somebody’d want to kill you.  I don’t find it makes a difference, him knowing why it's happening, so long as he knows who I am.”

“I’d stand firm on that part too.  People not knowing who you are?  You had yourself a national reputation.”

Despite what he’d said, he seemed content after all to stand there in the slush and grin up at Warren, and it wasn’t unbecoming, maybe.  It was how he looked on his knees, all eager to please.

“Anyway,” Mannix said, “if I’d known you planned to come back for him, I’d have waited.  But I can take you to where I planted him.”  He was pink-cheeked now, like he knew he’d fucked up by killing the man before Warren could do the job himself.

He looked a little pretty like that, sheepish and bloodthirsty and full of the knowledge he’d become somebody his daddy would have been ashamed of.  And right then Warren liked his company just fine.  He wouldn’t mind coming back to this moment again.  Wouldn't mind making it last a little longer.


End file.
